our endless numbered days
by vega-de-la-lyre
Summary: Scully wonders if they’d be able to go back now even if it were safe, and listens to the pinging of the rain against the plastic siding.


* * *

one.

* * *

They drive.

* * *

two.

* * *

They spend a weekend in the Rockies at a hotel that's been converted from a gold rush-era whorehouse. Scully fixes an icy glare on Mulder when the waiter tells her the standard ghost story over dinner; it's a sordid tale of murdered madams and jealous lovers, and Mulder scrubs one hand over his chin to hide his grin when it's finished.

"Really, Mulder," she says, stabbing at her salad with more force than is strictly necessary.

But it turns out that the hotel's owners are quite happy with their resident ghosts, thanks, after Mulder attempts to carry out a somewhat ill-conceived exorcism, and they beat a hasty retreat Sunday morning.

* * *

three.

* * *

Scully is fairly certain that this place is going to drive her crazy.

The prairie in springtime is gorgeous, yes; they're in the middle of an unusual dry spell as the summer approaches, and while the mornings and evenings are cool she's content to sleep in their front yard every afternoon under a cloudless blue sky that stretches further than she's ever seen, lazily watching the world around her come to life again in riotous colour. But the unvarying landscape and the flat unbroken horizon are maddening, in a creeping way that digs itself under her skin till she feels like she could scream. Their closest neighbour is half a day's drive away over muddy, unpaved back roads, a fact which may comfort Mulder but happens to leave her feeling more than a little ill at ease. They say this is the sort of country where you can sit on the veranda and watch your dog run away for three days; she figures that you could see someone approaching for about that length of time, too, and maybe that's why Mulder likes it here so much.

He kisses the freckles that stretch across her cheeks, her face and nose now flush with sunburn, and she swallows her complaints and cracks open a new novel.

* * *

four.

* * *

The wound Mulder takes off the super soldier is nasty but looks uglier than it really is, an angry scarlet laceration that runs the length of his torso, just managing to miss his major organs. It should heal up fine, eventually, but right now Scully's more concerned about the amount of blood he's lost; her hands definitely are not shaking as she lifts the gauze under his sweater to check how it's healing, though, touching with feather-light fingers the neat needlework that closes him up. It's the boneless way he's slumped, unconscious, in the blood-stained passenger seat that unnerves her. He'd passed out around the thirtieth stitch, a fact for which she is grateful, because when she's dealing with him — after all these years — she knows she's lost any kind of detached medical objectivity she might have once had, and she doesn't think she'd be have been able to stand watching him grow any greyer under her hands.

Scully lifts her feet and tucks them under her, staring blankly at the road. Mulder had grabbed at her face while she was dragging him from the slaughterhouse, had managed to choke out the name of an abandoned mine twenty minutes west of town, and so she'd driven, white-knuckled sweat-slick fingers grasping desperately at the wheel, where he directed her while he writhed in the seat beside her — she didn't know what his intentions were, to lie in wait, to take a stand, but at least they had something of a head start on the soldier thanks to a conveniently placed meat grinder. Magnetite deposits, he'd told her while she threaded the needle, poised it over his torn flesh with her elbow braced against the dashboard. Still a significant amount here; the funding had run out before the deposits did, and the company had been forced to pulled out due to bankruptcy two years ago.

It's something. It might save them. But he can't help her now; it's humid and sticky and Scully's stupid with the heat and helpless without him, because he's been so frustratingly protective of her in the last months, drawing into himself with his secrets and his schemes. He's always been several steps ahead of her, and she trusts him to know what he'd doing, but at times like this, she feels like hitting him over the head — or would, if he wasn't half-dead from blood loss as it was.

The air crackles with electricity as the storm clouds thundering overhead threaten to break. Mulder's blood on her skin itches as it dries.

* * *

five.

* * *

"_Zombies_," Mulder says, delighted.

Scully shakes her head, lips tight against a smile. "Zombie. Singular. For now."

* * *

  
Two hours later, and dawn is just lightening the edges of the horizon. Ronald is nothing but bits of rotting flesh and bone strewn across a scrubby yellowing field. Scully's leaning over Mulder with a frown of concentration on her pale face, dabbing at the filthy gash on his forehead with alcohol while he grimaces. "Stop making faces," she says, standing and stripping off the dirty latex gloves. "You're just making it worse."

Mulder shifts over on the backseat of the car to make room for her; she drops down wearily, pulling the door shut and hauling her legs under her. There's a smudge of mud across the bridge of her nose, and he swipes at it absently with his thumb. "C'mere," he says, "I think you've got some bits of brain in your hair."

She leans back and eyes him with something between exasperation and affection. "You're going to need stitches."

"Just in time for Hallowe'en," he says.

"Well, that's what you get when you let a zombie hit you over the head with a shovel," she says. "I should probably do it now."

He tugs her into his arms. "Too tired. All that running."

"Well," she says, teasing smile on her lips even as her lashes flutter drowsily, "I wouldn't actually say there was a lot of running going on. You were mostly falling, and flailing, and he was … lumbering."

"Shambling," Mulder says, letting his eyes fall shut. "That's a good word, isn't it? Very… what's the word. Evocative? He's a zombie, they shamble. Paints a pretty clear picture, _I_ think."

"We should get back to the motel," she murmurs somewhere in the vicinity of his collarbone.

"Mmm. I agree."

But neither of them move, and when the dawn breaks, the two of them are fast asleep.  


* * *

six.

* * *

She clutches, white-knuckled, at the thick package in her hands. There are more than a dozen thick letters, knotted up carefully with string and postmarked from cities all over the continent — Mexico City, Phoenix, Detroit, Seattle, Calgary, Montreal. Mulder is staring stoically ahead, eyes fixed on the road; Scully focuses on the steady squeak of the windshield wipers, on the watery red lights from the lumbering transport truck far ahead of them on the dark highway, and doesn't speak or look down at the letters she's holding so tightly in her lap.

She's never seen it rain so hard, but she doesn't say anything about the odds that they'll hydroplane or how they should maybe stop for the night; the muscle in Mulder's jaw jumps and he pulls into a motel parking lot all the same.

* * *

It's three in the morning and she's still not even close to tired. Scully sits on the side of the sagging bed, staring absently out the rain-streaked window at the blinking red lights of the motel sign while she towels her hair dry. Mulder sits on the opposite side of the bed, rereading a letter from Gibson in the dim lamplight. Scully has read all the others, from Reyes, from Doggett and Skinner and her mother, and she's gotten the message: Not yet. Soon. But it's not safe yet.

Mulder folds up the letter and drops it on top of the others. Scully turns her head, slightly, and doesn't say _I miss them_, or _I'm sick of running and I want to go home_, because the words stick in her throat and she can't put that burden on him. Mulder reaches out and pulls her tight against him; she buries her face in his neck and tries not to think about the photos Monica sent her with the letters along with an apologetic note: she'd been able to rescue most of Scully's things out of her apartment before they'd raided it, and she was so sorry, but they were all that she could get to them for the time being. A battered old Polaroid of an impossibly young Scully filing in the basement office, peering over the top of her overlarge glasses with a half-smile on her lips. A black-and-white photo of Mulder, his hair flopping boyishly over his forehead, perched atop a desk in deep conversation with the Lone Gunmen. A hazy snapshot of a day-old William in his father's arms, silhouetted against the morning light.

Mulder threads his fingers through her damp, rapidly curling hair, and shuts off the lamp.

Scully wonders if they'd be able to go back now even if it were safe, and listens to the pinging of the rain against the plastic siding.

* * *

seven

* * *

In her fractured dreams, she is walking alone through a sunlit outdoor maze, the air rich with the smells of damp soil and freshly fallen rain. She hears children laughing; she follows the sound slowly, trailing her fingers along the wet leaves of the hedge that towers above her, because walking is like moving through rushing water with currents that threaten to pull her every which way. She rounds a corner, then, and finds herself in the heart of the maze facing two slight figures; she catches a glimpse of a girl with straight strawberry-blonde hair and a gold cross glinting at her throat, twirling a lily idly through her fingers, and there is a little boy running wildly for her. Scully kneels, a lump forming in her throat, and flings her arms wide, but in moving the sun's glare blinds her for just a moment and she has to throw up one hand to protect her eyes.

When she blinks and her vision clears, they are gone and she finds herself at the foot of a grave. The dread tugs at her soul and she feels like she might soon fly apart, shatter into a million pieces, because it's Mulder below, ashen and cold and she can't lose him, not again. She plunges her hands into the earth and digs frantically as the rain starts to fall again, and she sobs like her heart has broken with the weight of all she's lost —

"Hey, Scully," he says.

She pushes herself upright in the car seat dazedly. Mulder stares at her, then folds himself into the car and tucks two coffee cups into the holders, shutting the door carefully behind him.

"Scully, are you okay?"

She manages to nod. Her heart is pounding and her cheeks are slick with tears; she holds out her hands before herself cautiously and examines them in the sickly orange light of the streetlamp just outside the window, half-expecting to find dirt wedged under her fingernails. "Yeah," she says hoarsely. "Bad dream."

Mulder watches her for a long moment while she swipes her palms over her wet face, and then nods to himself slightly. "Well, I was talking to the girl inside," he says, wrenching one of the cups out of the holder and passing it to her. "She said it'll only be another ten or minutes or so till the ferry comes in. That's apple cider. I thought it was appropriately seasonal."

The cup is scalding hot, but Scully curls her hands around it gratefully, clinging to it like the pain will drive away the ghosts that stand behind her shoulder at every waking moment. "Thank you," she whispers, and slumps back down in the seat, pushing her knees up against the dash. Mulder turns his head as though to say something, and when she raises the cider to her lips she finds her hands are trembling and she spills the hot drink down her neck.

Scully sits up again with a hiss of pain, clapping one hand to her neck. "Ouch," she says weakly, eyes stinging with sudden new tears.

"You all right?" he asks, digging a handful of crumpled napkins out of his coat pocket. "Let me have a look at that."

She stretches upward to turn on the overhead light and tilts her head to one side while his cool hands probe at her throat. There's an angry pink mark the size of his fist spreading on her porcelain-pale skin, but it isn't a serious burn, and he presses a quick kiss into the hollow of her neck; she tastes of tangy apples and spice, skin hot and sticky under his lips.

"Why, thank you, Doctor Mulder," she says with a hint of a wry smirk, and he lifts his hands from her shoulders, hair slipping like chilled silk through his fingers.

He grins at her as he flicks the light off and says in conspirational low tones, "They tell me my bedside manner is unparalleled."

She smiles back.


End file.
